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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Myth and ‘Following the Science’ The real nature of the apocalypse we’re facing. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/myth-and-following-the-science/

Increasingly over the last few centuries, science has become the dominant narrative of the West. The spectacular success of natural science in understanding, controlling, and transforming the material world has given science an authority that transcends the old certainties of faith, custom, and tradition. These authorities are now seen as retrograde, illiberal, and dangerous, the realm of superstition and myths that impede the ultimate triumph of progress and the utopia our cognitive elite “brights” who “follow the science” will create once the forces of reaction and unreason are corrected or eliminated.

Yet human nature––“the crooked timber,” as Kant put it, from which “nothing straight can be made”––continues to thwart this optimistic orthodoxy, partly because of our own hubris. We arrogantly claim more knowledge and wisdom and certainty than we actually have, even when talking about the natural world, let alone the unpredictable springs and consequences of our frequently irrational choices and actions.  Hence the beliefs and ideals that we think are the fruit of science and reason, often end up to be the detritus of old myths we dress up in the formulas and rhetoric of science.

In a time like the present––with a brutally destructive, potentially nuclear war in Ukraine, a looming global economic disaster, and especially an energy crisis created by our own irrational or venal polices that confuse science and myth––such policies are increasingly suicidal.

The threats to energy supplies, and the punitive costs of the fossil-fuel products that comprise 80% of all the energy we use, are a lesson in the dangers of claiming the unearned certainty of our science, and substituting gratify myths for established facts. Indeed, our current energy difficulties are the direct consequence of the progressives’ feckless “green” energy cult of zero-carbon emissions, and its misguided attempts to replace cheap, abundant fossil fuels with unreliable, expensive “renewable” solar and wind power.

Pelosi’s ‘Winning’ Message To Voters: Quit Griping About Inflation

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/20/pelosis-winning-message-to-voters-quit-griping-about-inflation/

To all those suffering from skyrocketing prices, struggling to make ends meet, going to food kitchens to feed their families, breaking the bank just to fill up their tanks, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a message for you.

Quit your griping and vote Democratic.

That is the “new and improved” messaging that Pelosi thinks will win over voters in November.

And no, we are not kidding. In an interview with Punchbowl News published on Wednesday, here’s what she said:

Inflation’s an issue, but it’s global. It’s global. … What’s [the Republicans’] plan? They ain’t got nothing. When you bring down unemployment, inflation goes up. … So, in any case, [President Joe Biden] brought unemployment [down], cut it in half. Inflation is there but it’s global and not as bad as it is in some countries. We’ll have to message it better in the next three weeks ahead. I think we’re in great shape. Other people don’t want to believe that.

Let’s break that down.

“It’s global.” Not exactly.

The U.S. inflation rate is worse than 13 of the G20 nations. Canada’s has been steadily declining since June. And several European countries are suffering higher prices thanks to their decision to impose the idiotic “clean energy” mandates Biden wants to import. Energy costs in Germany, for example, were up 44% in September.

In any case, telling people “everybody’s suffering, so don’t feel so bad,” is not what we’d call a winning message.

Who Denies Election Results? There is nothing “unprecedented” about challenging election results. And for Democrats, there’s nothing unprecedented in trying to manipulate them. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/19/who-denies-election-results/

A Democratic myth has arisen that Donald Trump’s denial of the accuracy of the 2020 vote was “unprecedented.”

Unfortunately, the history of U.S. elections is often a story of both legitimate and illegitimate election denialism. 

The 1800, 1824, 1876, and 1960 elections were all understandably questioned. In some of these cases, a partisan House of Representatives decided the winner.  

Presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000 did not accept the popular vote results in Florida. He spent five weeks futilely contesting the state’s tally—until recounts and the Supreme Court certified it. 

The ensuing charge that George W. Bush was “selected not elected” was the Democrats’ denialist mantra for years.

In 2004, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and 31 Democratic House members voted not to certify the Ohio election results in their unhinged efforts to overturn the election. Those denialists included the current sanctimonious chairman of the January 6 select committee, U.S. Representative Benny Thompson (D-Miss). 

After 2016, crackpot Democratic orthodoxy for years insisted that Donald Trump had “colluded” with Russia to “steal” certain victory from Hillary Clinton. 

Clinton herself claimed that Trump was not a “legitimate” president. No wonder she loudly joined #TheResistance to obstruct his presidency. 

The serial denialist Clinton later urged Joe Biden not to concede the 2020 election if he lost.  

Also after 2016, left-wing third-party candidate and denialist Jill Stein vainly sued in courts to disqualify voting machine results in preselected states. 

A denialist host of Hollywood C-list actors in 2016 cut television commercials begging members of the Electoral College to violate their oaths and instead flip the election to Hillary Clinton. 

Clinton herself had hired foreign national Christopher Steele to concoct a dossier of untruths to smear her 2016 campaign opponent, Donald Trump. 

The FBI took up Clinton’s failed efforts. It likewise paid in vain her ancillaries like Christopher Steele to “verify” the dossier’s lies. 

The bureau further misled a FISA court about the dossier’s authenticity. An FBI lawyer even altered a document, as part of a government effort to disrupt a presidential transition and presidency. 

Democrats take ‘fake news’ to new lows By Jack Hellner

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/democrats_take_fake_news_to_new_lows.html

Democrats are expanding their misinformation campaign, devising new avenues to promote a false narrative. In a stunning revelation, The Washington Examiner reported that over the course of the last year, Democrats have launched fake “local media outlets” to swing elections in favor of their candidates. According to the article:

Democrats have launched a number of feigned local news outlets in key swing states as a way to push party-aligned content ahead of the midterm elections, according to reports.

At least 51 apparent local news outlets have cropped up in the last year across 10 battleground states under names such as the Milwaukee Metro times or the Mecklenburg Herald, according to Axios. The sites operate by aggregating stories about sports and other local news while mixing in heavily slanted political content propping up Democratic candidates.

They’ve stooped to literal fake news outlets to promote themselves, which some might consider election interference, all while they lecture the public about the threat of Republicans and continue with the January 6 theatrical performance.

WaPo — which seeks to elect Democrats and push the leftist agenda everyday — complains about newspapers who push a partisan agenda. They hilariously act like they are unbiased. Yet, the WaPo and the NYT both won Pulitzers for peddling lies about Russia collusion for years.

How many times does the media have to see the absolute corruption and partisanship of the FBI as they target Trump and other Republicans with fictional crimes, while protecting criminals like Hillary and Biden, before they tell the public the truth instead of pretending that they are apolitical and that no one is above the law?

We recently learned the FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million to take a fictional dossier and “prove it” true. Even though the FBI knew it was a manufactured document paid for by Hillary and the DNC, they used it to lie to the FISA court as a pretense to spy and entrap. Why aren’t the FBI criminals, like Comey, in jail for committing a massive fraud on the American people? How much money?

How many instances of massive corruption does the media, FBI, and other Democrats need to see to care?

The media has known about the Biden family corruption long before they campaigned for him. Back as 2012, it appears the Biden family was actually colluding with Russian oligarchs:

A real estate company with ties to first son Hunter Biden received more than $100 million from a Russian billionaire for property investments across the US that date back a decade, sources have told The Post.

From Russia to the FBI, with Love How the FBI agent who spied for Russia set the stage for the FBI’s betrayal of the American people. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-russia-to-the-fbi-with-love/

Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the infamous dossier deployed against Donald Trump in 2016, was acquitted Tuesday of lying to the FBI. If the verdict seems surprising, consider the back story. Danchenko, a Russian national, was once on the FBI payroll.

As Julie Kelly explains, that made the Russian part of the bureau’s untouchable “sources and methods,” protecting him and any documents referencing him from congressional and other outside scrutiny. That invites a look at another man on the bureau’s payroll, the FBI agent who spied for Russia and escaped scrutiny for 15 years.

According to the FBI, Robert Phillip Hanssen was “the most damaging spy in Bureau history,” arrested on February 18, 2001, and charged with espionage on behalf of Russia and the former Soviet Union. The FBI man, who swore an oath to enforce the law and protect the nation as an FBI agent, “provided highly classified national security information to the Russians in exchange for more than $1.4 million in cash, bank funds, and diamonds.”

Hanssen held “key counterintelligence positions” and beginning in 1985, he used encrypted communications, ‘dead drops,’ and other clandestine methods to provide information to the KGB and its successor agency, the SVR. The information he delivered compromised numerous human sources, counterintelligence techniques, investigations, dozens of classified U.S. government documents, and technical operations of extraordinary importance and value.”

What the Firing of Prof. Maitland Jones Says about Our Democracy Too many people have been let into the future. by Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-the-firing-of-prof-maitland-jones-says-about-our-democracy/

The swift firing of the renowned chemist Maitland Jones by New York University is still being discussed in the academic world and even among the commentariat that generally would have moved on to the next topic the day after the event had occurred.

Perhaps there is something perturbing about an 85-year-old esteemed professor who had had a distinguished career at Princeton before joining NYU being fired under such nefarious circumstances. After 82 of his 350 students signed a petition complaining that his organic chemistry course was too difficult, and that they did not like the way he ran his course, he was discharged. They further claimed that he lacked empathy; empathy towards those students who had family problems and mental health issues. But basically, his workload was regarded as too demanding against the backdrop of myriad courses students had to take aside from chemistry.

That less than a quarter of his students (23.4%, actually), could marshal enough power to have him discharged from a career spanning over five decades is frightening and disgraceful. Not one of the students came forward and publicly identified him- or herself. They signed a petition anonymously—these cowardly perverse members of the Olympics Oppression team who fail to realize that college is designed to provide one with skill sets and information in particular fields and then to certify that the individual has mastered them. Universities and colleges, too, are not just educative institutions. They are ones that, in the ideal sense, weed out those who are unfit to be in them; that is, those who fail to qualify to meet the standards required to be certified as mastering the skills and knowledge in a field, whether it be in chemistry, medicine, history, nursing, the law, or philosophy. We are, though, wedded to the egalitarian progressive idea that everyone who enrolls in a university has a constitutional and democratic right to graduate. Hell hath no fury like a parent whose child, after repeatedly failing all his courses, is given an honorable and noble piece of advice: The academic life is not meant for you. You’re smart, and your smarts lie in a trade school. You’d actually make a superb plumber, or carpenter.

But back to Professor Jones. How did we arrive at a point in our society where 82 village idiots had the temerity to make such preposterous demands, and were granted the institutional power to have their intellectual superior fired from his professorship?

Biden costs average Americans $34,000 in retirement savings in 2022 —study By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/biden_costs_average_americans_34000_in_retirement_savings_in_2022_study.html

We already know that Joe Biden has cost Americans an average of $6,000 in paycheck power from the inflation that has come of his billions and trillions in government spending, including his mockingly misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022.

While Biden has at various times claimed that inflation comes from Russia, greedy oil companies, Republicans, or chicken factories, and in any case is transitory, if not zero, inflation is something serious economists recognize as a monetary phenomenon.  Inflation, after all, is priced in money, and monetary agencies such as the Federal Reserve print up the cash it takes for all that government spending. The inflation comes from Joe.

But inflation is hitting far more than just pocketbooks and savings accounts — it’s also eating away at Americans’ retirement savings, in their 401(k)s and other retirement accounts.

Economists Stephen Moore and E.J. Antoni decided to calculate just how much in a column for the New York Post.  They did the math:

We’ve just completed an analysis of how the highest inflation rate in almost 40 years has impacted the retirement funds of ordinary Americans. Here is what we found.

Not surprisingly, since President Biden took office, monthly savings have collapsed, falling 83%. (We could never understand how Biden could say with a straight face that Americans are saving more. His “transformation” of the US economy has had just the opposite effect.) Many millions of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck just don’t have the money after paying the inflated bills to save much.

But to add insult to injury, even what has been already saved and invested by older Americans over past years and even over several decades has been erased from these accounts.

Thanks to the thief of inflation.

Inflation has not only cut the value of stocks, and bonds, for that matter, it has reduced the value of the savings that are still left.

Here Come The Tantrums

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/19/here-come-the-tantrums/

Donald Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 led to an election denial that still runs hot today in Democrat circles. But the left also threw anti-Trump tantrums across the country, many of them long before anyone had voted. Should Republicans unseat the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in the coming midterms, as is expected, we will again see the childishness and narcissism that drives the Democratic Party.

Who can forget the videos of celebrities as well as the unknowns wailing and shrieking and coming apart at the thought of Trump in the White House? In several instances, the demonstrations against the president-elect on the evening of the 2016 election and after turned violent. These political hissy fits have been a combination of performative art and a childish expression of emotion. Despite the differences, the aim is the same: Extortion.

When a toddler has a conniption, flails about and pounds the floor, he is saying: “Give me what I want or I will make your life miserable.” In the case of frothy political meltdowns, the adult children are saying that if they don’t get their way in elections, they will continue to cry, screech, and hold their breath. And of course the high temperatures are stoked by the Democratic Party-media industrial complex, which has become somewhat indistinguishable from a playroom swarming with spoiled tots.

Even after Trump left office, the deranged venting of spleens remained a staple of the left. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats again looked liked overgrown preschoolers. At the time we pointed out, in an editorial headlined The American Mushroom Cloud, that Democratic Sen. Elizabeth “Warren’s fevered tirade clearly shows we have reached the point that the left has decided that policy will not be made like sausage but through tantrum, intimidation, and riot.”

The FBI’s Million-Dollar Men Three high-profile trials are shining much-needed light on how the bureau uses highly paid informants as political hit men. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/17/the-fbis-million-dollar-men/

Proceedings underway in three U.S. courtrooms are providing a coordinated view into the abuse of the FBI’s confidential human source (CHS) program, a cash-flush operation now primarily used to bolster Democratic Party narratives instead of detecting and preventing crime.

As I’ve reported, the FBI spends an average of $42 million per year to pay informants and does so with absolutely no financial or legal accountability. Confidential human sources are paid in cash; they can offer their services for a variety of reasons including financial need or to obtain a change in immigration status. FBI agents are required to keep at least one informant on the books, an FBI whistleblower told me; successfully using a CHS to bust up a crime is one way to get promoted.

But ongoing trials related to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, January 6, and the Whitmer fednapping case are once again shining a light on the way the bureau hires snitches to advance political goals.

After numerous investigations over the course of more than six years—not to mention an obsessive fixation by the national media—the scandal known as Russiagate produced another bombshell revelation during the perjury trial of Igor Danchenko, the key source for the Steele dossier. The FBI offered to pay Christopher Steele, its author, up to $1 million in cash if he could verify the dossier’s declarations about Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. He could not.

Described for years as a “former British intelligence officer,” Steele, in fact, was a private consultant with several paymasters in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained Steele to write his dossier that alleged shadowy connections between the Kremlin and Trump associates. At the same time, Steele was lobbying the U.S. government on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who ran afoul of the Obama Administration.

Protests in Iran: The Silence of the ‘Feminists’ and ‘Progressives’ Talk about “men telling women what to do with their bodies”! by Larry Elder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/protests-in-iran-the-silence-of-the-feminists-and-progressives/

Where are the American feminists and “progressives” when we need them? You know, the men-versus-women, pro-abortion types who say things like the reversal of Roe v. Wade represents “men wanting to tell women what to do with their bodies”?

Last month, on Sept. 16, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman living in Iran, died in a hospital three days after being arrested in Tehran by the state’s morality police known as “Guidance Patrols.” Her “crime”? She showed too much hair underneath her hijab, or headscarf.

The New York Times reported: “The police did not offer an explanation for why Ms. Amini was detained, other than that it involved the hijab rule. Her mother said in an interview with Iranian news media that her daughter was observing the rules and wearing a long, loose robe. She said Ms. Amini was arrested as she exited the subway with her brother, and that his pleas that they were visitors to the city were ignored.”

According to the BBC: “Eyewitnesses said Mahsa Amini was beaten while inside a police van when she was picked up in Tehran on Tuesday. Police have denied the allegations, saying Ms Amini had ‘suddenly suffered a heart problem.’” However, at least one Iranian judicial official, according to state media, said the woman suffered “multiple fractures … in the pelvis, head, upper and lower limbs, arms and legs, which indicate that the person was thrown from a height.”

In protest, women in Iran are cutting their hair, with some taking to social media and burning their hijabs. Two weeks ago, CNN reported: “Protests have swept through more than 40 Iranian cities, including the capital Tehran. Iranian security forces have been cracking down on protesters, with hundreds arrested and at least 41 killed, according to state media. Some human rights organizations say the death toll is as high as 76.” As for Iran, Human Right Watch states: “Since March 21, 2022, at the beginning of Iranian New Year, Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) has documented 306 executions, 130 of them for drug-related charges and 151 of them based on the Islamic principle of qisas, or ‘retribution in kind’ punishments. Between May 21 and June 21 alone, the group documented 99 executions.”